noirish Los Angeles

[Albany NY]

Thank you so much, Michael. I'll definitely check it out.

[WS1911]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

1230 W. 49th Street, circa 1911.

before

ebay

after

gsv
__

Still there and holding its own. It needs TLC. Zillow says it has 2 bedrooms and 1 bath, 1,344 sq. ft., built in 1910.

[tovangar2]

.

[alanlutz]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

I found this 1925 photograph among ebay images I had saved to a cd.



The alley intrigued me right away so I checked Google Earth and there it was.



google earth

ER, I was just walking by that very Lebanon Street (alley) on one of my recent trips to L.A. Here is a shot I took from 7th Street looking north between the HSBC Bldg and the Fine Arts Bldg. Apparently LA Sheriffs like to park here while they are checking for Metro tickets right below on the 7th/Metro Red/Purple/Blue/Aqua lines subway station. I know, one of them asked me to show my EZ transit pass on the way up to the street level.

[alanlutz]

And speaking of the Fine Arts Bldg.(1927) with the two reclining men on the front, I finally went inside and the guard was nice enough to let me take all the photos I wanted. He even let me use the restroom on the second floor which gave me opportunity to take some shots from the upper vantage point.

Above doorway of Fine Arts Building


Ceiling detail






And from the ground floor

[Flyingwedge]

Last week it was announced that the long-vacant Merced Theatre at 420 N. Main Street will be renovated into the new home of Cityview, the government-access TV channel in Los Angeles. Here's the news article: http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...,3143182.story

Merced Theatre . . . this is your life!

You were designed by Ezra F. Kysor, architect of your next-door neighbor, the Pico House. You were built by William Abbott, the son of Swiss immigrants who came to Los Angeles in 1854. He named you after his wife, Maria Merced Garcia, whom he married in 1858. You were completed on December 31, 1870 and hosted the first professional engagement in your second-floor auditorium on January 30, 1871. Here's a photo dated December 1, 1869, showing your lot before you were constructed (BTW, Pico House construction was 9/18/69 - 6/9/70):

USC Digital Library - http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/si.../id/3351/rec/1 (and posted by ER way back on p. 21)

From 1871 to 1876 you served as the center of theatrical activity in Los Angeles. This photo of you is dated c. 1876, but may be a little earlier:

LAPL - http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics17/00008121.jpg

You closed as a theater January 1, 1877, due to competition from the new Woods Opera House (known as the Club Theater from 1883) four doors south and due to a smallpox epidemic. Perhaps this photo, given different dates by different sources, is around 1876:

LAPL - http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics16/00007539.jpg

In this c. 1880 photo, your banner says "Dancing Academy":

LAPL - http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics16/00007561.jpg

In 1888 were you the scene of a different kind of drama, given that you housed both the Salvation Army and a wholesale liquor business?:

Sanborn Map @ LAPL

By 1894 the wholesale liquor business had won out, eh?:

Sanborn Map @ LAPL

By 1906 you had new tenants:

Sanborn Map @ LAPL (Pssst. Party after school at 420 Sanchez Street. Pass it on.)

Here you are in c. 1909:

USC - http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/si.../id/2293/rec/1 (also posted by ER on p. 21)

Do you remember how you looked back around 1920?:

LAPL - http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater2/00015405.jpg

And do you remember when your neighbor was called Old Pico House?:

LAPL - http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics16/00007546.jpg

Was it especially windy on North Main back in the mid-40s? Seems like a lot of pedestrian-ensaring guy wire there:

LAPL - http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater2/00015402.jpg (MichaelRyerson posted a similar photo last August: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=8703)

In this 1960 photo it looks like you and your southern neighbor, the 1858 Masonic Hall, are about to get some TLC:

LAPL - http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater2/00015409.jpg

By 1968 you looked a lot better, at least on the outside:

LAPL - http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater2/00015407.jpg

And in August 2012:

GSV

Good luck to you, Merced Theatre. I hope you last another 143 years. Now if they'd just open up the Pico House . . . .

# # #

More info here: http://elpueblo.lacity.org/elpmt1.htm and here http://elpueblo.lacity.org/elpph1.htm
More info, old and new pics, and plans here: https://sites.google.com/site/downto...merced-theatre

[lemster2024]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

1230 W. 49th Street, circa 1911.

before

ebay

after

gsv
__

Amazing photo, e-r! This house looks amazingly like the one I grew up in...maybe that's because we weren't that far away at the 700 block of 49th Street! There are many wood frame houses in that area that date from the 1920's, many with Craftsman-like interior features: brick fireplaces with full width mantels, raised, coffered ceilings with moulding, built-in lawyer bookcases that served as room dividers, etc...Ours had a full plot length driveway that led to a 3-car garage with separate workshop space. My father purchased the house in 1954 for about $8000. We also had one of those backyard incinerators that were subsequently banned...I'll post a pic of my old house once I figure out what I'm doing wrong!

[Flyingwedge]

Originally Posted by alanlutz

And speaking of the Fine Arts Bldg.(1927) with the two reclining men on the front, I finally went inside and the guard was nice enough to let me take all the photos I wanted. He even let me use the restroom on the second floor which gave me opportunity to take some shots from the upper vantage point.

Beautiful building and photos! Is that a fountain in the middle of the floor?

[MichaelRyerson]

No, not 'Every Single Building on the Sunset Strip' but close...so technically no, e_r, not the Ed Ruscha book you were hoping for but still one I really like. A copy of 'Every Single Building...' goes for somewhat north of a thousand dollars and a new copy of Then and Now will set you back a hundred and a quarter (I got mine used for about half that)...




Ed Ruscha’s 'Then & Now' at Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles

VANISHING

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Ed Ruscha gets it, and he’s made Los Angeles the subject of his art for decades. But these days, anyone living in L.A. gets it -- the city’s everyday landmarks have become expendable. It is not uncommon to round a corner and see that some beloved building has been eradicated, often in less than 24 hours. What has all this to do with Ed Ruscha? "Then & Now," his exhibition at Gagosian Gallery (which is also in Beverly Hills), on view Oct. 27-Dec. 24, 2005, is an extended meditation on this very subject. Inside the lush Richard Meier-designed space is a long white vitrine containing Ruscha’s photographs of every building along the main stretch of Hollywood Boulevard as he photographed them in black and white in 1973 and as he re-photographed them in color in 2004. The work references his ground-breaking 1966 artist’s book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Steidl Verlag has published these 142 Hollywood Boulevard photographs as Then and Now, the artist’s first book project in many years.
It is mesmerizing to see the ways that one of the city’s most notorious boulevards has been treated by time, like the proverbial movie star preserved in her youth on celluloid and then appearing in a matronly role at the end of her career. She is still fabulous in maturity but her sassy insouciance has been lost. It is not that the buildings on Hollywood Boulevard are less beautiful. In fact, they were tackier in the ‘70s. By now, they have been "improved" by the "good taste" that is being imposed on the city the way stylists now dress starlets for the academy awards. Bad taste is out, which is why the tasteful Montage Hotel must replace the tacky but authentically strange pseudo-mosque that charmed and intrigued for decades. Ruscha’s installation at Gagosian captures the upsetting nature of these developments. A serpentine vitrine leads a viewer from east to west or vice versa, with two sets of color and black-and-white photos, each facing opposite directions. No matter where one stands, one is faced with two lines of upright photos and two lines of upside down photos. Since one is looking down into the vitrines, as though reading the book, a sort of reverie of passing time takes hold.
The installation generates an intentional disorientation that mimics the effect of living in a city where entire blocks can be quickly transformed into malls or condominium complexes. Years of visual memories are roughly displaced, the character of funky neighborhoods is "improved" and one finds that the terra firma of one’s hometown is no more than the shifting sands of time. Ruscha’s photographs depict some losses: a 1920s Mediterranean apartment building was replaced by the hideous Galaxy movie complex; a modest ranch home is adorned by ridiculous columns and plaster statues on pedestals. Meanwhile, L.A. is greener today with towering trees and privet hedges wrapped around the most modest bungalows. Ruscha’s real theme is change and the bewildering pace of it.

<a href="http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp11-28-05_detail.asp?picnum=2" rel="nofollow">www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/drohojowska-philp/droh...</a>

artnet.com

[westcork]

More of the Merced


Library of Congress


Library of Congress


Library of Congress

[ethereal_reality]

Excellent post on the Merced Theater Flyingwedge!

Originally Posted by Flyingwedge

And do you remember when your neighbor was called Old Pico House?:

LAPL - http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics16/00007546.jpg

-I never knew they renamed it 'Old Pico House'.
__

[ethereal_reality]

Originally Posted by alanlutz

The Fine Arts Bldg.(1927)

Wow, what a 'old world' lobby. I love it!
__

[ethereal_reality]

Los Angeles Brewery (off hand I can't remember where this brewery was located)


ebay
__

[gdunn2]

Hello,

This is my first post. I found this map that shows the LA industries that were served by rail in 1925. I thought this might be a good thing to put in my "toolbox" The link to the map is http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single...id/10751/rec/8 You may download a copy from the site.

I have been following the thread for about 6 months now. Growing up in Pasadena in the 1950s was such a treat. I'm now retired and living in the Pacific Northwest.

PM

[ethereal_reality]

Welcome to the thread gDunn2! That's a great map.
__



Luncheon at the Biltmore, 1949.


ebay
__

[ethereal_reality]

Edgeware & Temple


http://www.skyscrapercity.com/index.php

today

gsv




a better view of the house (a public elementary school is next door)


gsv





and the store on the corner.


gsv

To the immediate left (and out of view) is the Hollywood Freeway.
__

[ethereal_reality]

Has anyone heard of MARBRO'S? (notice the Santa Fe ticket office across the street)


ebay

I believe this is Santa Monica.
__

[tovangar2]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Los Angeles Brewery (off hand I can't remember where this brewery was located)


__

That's where Eastside ("Put Eastside Inside") beer was brewed.

Post here: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=10485


Thank you Flyingwedge and alanlutz. Gorgeous posts.
(BTW, the tilework at the Fine Arts is by Batchelder Studios)



P.S.

Here's a current pic of the Brewery Arts Complex (formerly the Los Angeles Brewing Company)
2100 N Main (between the 5 and the river):


gsv

Good LAT article on Eastside. George Zobelein really was one of the good guys:

http://articles.latimes.com/1997/sep/07/local/me-29791


http://www.taverntrove.com/item.php?ItemId=55084

Zobelein was, if you recall, the one who tried to save El Aliso when he was partnered with Maier

[tovangar2]

Originally Posted by fhammon

Sorry if I brought this up before but I've always been curious about this stack of triangular objects in the bottom center of this 1869 Plaza photo.
Does anybody have any idea what they are?

http://waterandpower.org/museum/Earl...Page_1%29.html

Something similar is noted in the upper left corner of the Plaza in the 1873 map, drawn as three horseshoe shaped objects.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/95072967@N02/8663075373/

I asked Jack Feldman over at the Water and Power Museum about this (I thought maybe it was something to do with the reservoir). Here's his reply:

"... With regard to the triangular shaped objects in the Plaza.....it looks like a truss that is used in construction. Around the time of this photo (1869), the water reservoir in the the middle of the Plaza was taken down and the Plaza was reconfigured round with a new fountain installed at its center. These trusses could have something to do with this new construction (just a wild guess)."

[CityBoyDoug]

By 1906 you had new tenants:




So by 1906 Los Angeles had a semi official Opium Joint? Note the title at the right side, middle of block.